Bryce Richter / UW–Madison
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers speaks during a College of Engineering groundbreaking ceremony on April 17, 2025.
Gov. Tony Evers will soon have two vacancies to fill on the UW Board of Regents.
The American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin is waging a public campaign to urge Gov. Tony Evers to appoint two pro-labor representatives to the UW Board of Regents. It’s a first for the teachers’ union, but a necessary move given the danger President Donald Trump poses to higher education, says one union official.
“We had a Democratic Board of Regents that was presiding over the closure of two-year schools, the shrinkage of the [four-year campuses], and an attempt to massively increase online education,” says Neil Kraus, a political science professor and president of UW-River Falls’ chapter of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin. “That was all before Trump, and now we've got a new administration in Washington that's openly hostile to higher education.”
AFT-Wisconsin launched a petition in early April to urge Evers to appoint Greg Jones, president of NAACP Dane County, and Michael Rosen, a former economics instructor and union official at Milwaukee Area Technical College, to the board. The terms of Regents Héctor Colón, an Evers appointee, and Cris Peterson, appointed by former Gov. Scott Walker, end in May.
Regents serve in both policy-making and oversight roles. In the past biennium, they have voted to restructure the Universities of Wisconsin diversity, equity and inclusion programming, fire former UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow, and lay off 35 tenured UW-Milwaukee professors. The Board of Regents meets eight times annually; appointed members do not receive pay for their service.
The seat reserved for an undergraduate is also up for appointment in May, but Jon Shelton, president of AFT-Wisconsin and a UW-Green Bay political science professor, says that pushing for a particular student would create an uncomfortable “potential power dynamic.”
“I don't think we're going to go near that one anytime soon,” says Shelton.
There is a “very real possibility” that higher education funding and student financial aid will be “dramatically altered” under Trump’s administration, says Shelton. Trump has sought to close the U.S. Department of Education, which would transfer the responsibility of student aid disbursement to a yet-undetermined federal agency. The president and his appointees have also attacked universities’ diversity, equity and inclusion programming and cut off the flow of millions in research dollars, including at UW-Madison.
“It is more important than ever that the people governing the system and the people working in the system are actually working together to be able to defend our institutions against those things and preserve the integrity of public higher education,” Shelton says.
Shelton says he sent the petition — which now has over 400 signatures — to Evers’ office on April 18 but has not yet received a response.
Jones is a former administrator at UW-Eau Claire and UW-Madison who Shelton says “would definitely take a civil rights perspective, but also a worker-centered perspective” to the regents’ deliberations. And Rosen, Shelton notes, created a program to provide Milwaukee Area Technical College students with emergency funds, something that shows “he would be very worker-centered and obviously student-centered as well.”
Jones says he has a strong background in admissions, advising and financial aid, and state government, including some time working for Gov. Lee Dreyfuss in the 1980s. In Jones’ view, “the civil rights journey and the labor journey are one and the same.”
Jones says he’d like the regents to have an “open door conversation policy” on all issues, including collective bargaining. “[And] I would like to see a structured plan of action where there are sequential, periodic meetings on issues.”
Rosen, who previously served on the Wisconsin Technical College System Board as an appointee of Gov. Jim Doyle, calls himself a “product of the system” — he completed his undergraduate studies at UW-Madison and doctorate at UW-Milwaukee. He says the universities are “engines of growth.”
“It is a world class research university system, [with] research universities UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, and it plays a critical role in our state, in educating citizenry and in doing groundbreaking research,” says Rosen. “It would be an honor to contribute to that as a part of my civic responsibility.”
In Kraus’ view, current regents have been unwilling to push back against budget cuts throughout the UW system, whose campuses have faced enrollment challenges and declining state support. Since 2023 the UW system has shut down five of its two-year branch campuses, and four-year campuses have been forced to lay off academic staff. Kraus says Jones and Rosen would “bring perspectives that are just nowhere…that are not allowed in the room at the Board of Regents.”
“I can't imagine either Greg or Michael just going along with a corporate narrative that's being imposed,” Kraus says.
AFT wants the regents to require chancellors to hold ongoing meetings with faculty and academic staff union leadership to discuss working conditions. After the passage of Act 10 in 2011, collective bargaining between chancellors and academic staff was outlawed. But informal “meet and confer” agreements are still legally permissible — Evers himself brokered one between UW Health nurses and upper management in fall 2022. Shelton notes that Evers in September endorsed a meet and confer agreement between chancellors and academic faculty and staff.
Shelton says allowing these direct conversations about labor conversations and student resources would produce outcomes that would be “better for everybody.”
Rosen agrees: “If faculty voice is not part of the decision-making process, you're much more likely to make poor decisions that are harmful to students and the community.”
Evers’ office did not respond to a request for comment. AFT is holding a virtual public town hall with Jones and Rosen on Wednesday.
